Essays in international economic policymaking

In this dissertation I present three essays that contribute to current discussions on international economic policymaking from a political economy and a historical perspective. In chapters 2 and 3 I take the view that the political process is an important constraint to economic policy outcomes. With this in mind, I incorporate interest groups into the analisys of international economic policies. I start from the premise that interest-group politics are important because policy decisions usually have redistributive consequences that leads to the formation of lobbies and pressures group trying to guarantee that the chosen policies benefit their constituencies; and, further, because decision-makers themselves may attempt to obtain personal gains form those policy decisions, I apply such political economy perspective to current discussions on the compatibility between regional and multilateral trade initiatives and to debates about the appropriate management of the exchange rate in an era of increased financial integration.; In chapter 4 I take a step back from the political economy analysis of the rest of the dissertation and offer, instead, a historical perspective on a central issue in current policy debates: the choice between alternative exchange-rate regimes. In particular, I focus on the links between exchange-rate regimes and international trade toward the end of the nineteenth century, a period of global integration very comparable to the contemporary resurgence of globalization.; Using a gravity equation that accounts for the existence of currency unions and alternative monetary regimes, I study the correlates of bilateral trade for a global sample of countries during the period 1870–1910. I find that membership in a monetary union roughly doubled bilateral trade among its members, while linking up to the gold standard when a trade partner was on gold could have increased trade by at least 60 percent. In contrast, I show that exchange rate volatility had a negligible effect on the level of trade, but that in a few particular cases high volatility co-existed with high trade volumes. My estimates are robust to different econometric techniques. More importantly, they corroborate similar studies that look at the more recent past and provide support for international coordination in managing exchange rates. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...